We take a look at the history of PHP and how the popular language evolved, and compare this evolution to Terraform, a popular infrastructure as code framework.

Key takeaways:

• Writing infrastructure as code shows many of the same challenges as writing code for application development, because many of these challenges are not language or use-case specific.
• Terraform and its surrounding ecosystem are still evolving and share many similarities with early PHP and the web. Just like PHP evolved by learning from other language ecosystems, Terraform can as well.
• Use-case specific frameworks are a major driver of innovation, improved developer experience, and productivity on the application development side, but are not yet established parts of the infrastructure as code ecosystem.
• The paradigm shift to containers and  Kubernetes made use-case specific frameworks possible for infrastructure as code by providing a powerful abstraction between application and infrastructure layer. And the cloud native community is evolving rapidly, extending this abstraction to additional use-cases.
• Organizations that adopted application development frameworks for their improved developer experience and productivity, can leverage the same benefits for automating Kubernetes by using an  infrastructure as code framework and avoid leaving the cluster the weakest link in their GitOps automation.

#devops #kubernetes #gitops #php